Student Profiles

Young Entrepreneur Connects Leaders with Constituents

How many undergraduates can list CEO and founder of a business on their resume? Meet Conor White-Sullivan ’10 (anthropology) who has led the development of business structure and long-term strategy for Localocracy.org, an online platform that uses voting, ranking and tagging to determine what registered voters believe are their community's most pressing problems and the most efficient means of solving them.

And it sounds as though he’s on to something interesting. At the end of this past semester Localocracy.org received the third prize of $10,000 in UMass Amherst’s Innovation Challenge Final Business Plan Competition. The Innovation Challenge is a cross-campus collaboration of the College of Engineering and the Isenberg School of Management.

Says White-Sullivan, “The money from the challenge, as well as the SBS Dean’s Opportunity Scholarship I received in May, have freed me to fully dedicate myself to Localocracy.org and my vision for changing the world. These resources can make this vision a reality.”

But let’s backtrack to the concept. A couple of years ago White-Sullivan was impressed by a Myles Horton quote: “The answers to a community’s problems come from the people.” Combine that with the communicative and organizational power of the Internet, and an idea emerged. Explains White-Sullivan, “Many individuals and organizations are committed to improving their communities (i.e. health, education, the environment, poverty, hunger, homelessness, etc.), and local political issues (e.g. roads, schools, property taxes) are often the ones that hit closest to home. Yet, there is no online space where citizens can efficiently identify the most critical needs of their community, and debate and popularize innovative and efficient ways of meeting them.”

White-Sullivan’s company will provide cities and towns a neutral and organized online platform for conversation around local issues where leaders can efficiently connect with their constituents with tools that will help ensure that the most insightful and supported ideas prevail.

“Our approach,” White-Sullivan explains, “maximizes the strength of existing social technologies by allowing users to draw in supporters from blogs, forums, and social networks while pushing updates through Twitter, Facebook newsfeeds, text-messaging, and embedded widgets. Our method of verifying the identity and residency of voters creates a statistically relevant and reliable platform, making it highly applicable for 'Government 2.0' initiatives.” White-Sullivan has been working with some Amherst Town Meeting members, including Baer Tierkel who has spent more than 25 years in the enterprise software industry.

“As a nation and as a world we are facing incredible large problems regarding the environment, the economy and the state of public education,” Says White-Sullivan. “Our platform will offer an effective tool to re-engage people into their communities, allowing them to make their voices heard, and thereby motivating them to take further action. This will lead to the faster creation, distribution, and implementation of better and more efficient solutions to community needs. We expect our initial release will occur next spring.”

So that’s the concept, but whatever gave White-Sullivan the idea that he could be an entrepreneur? “Well, I was adamant when I came to UMass Amherst that I would pursue an education, not a training,” White-Sullivan says. “In my first two years I took a broad range of courses, but found I was most interested in seeing the world from radically different perspectives.” By chance, he stumbled on the Citizen Scholars Program, a leadership development program that integrates theory and practice. “The application essay I wrote was the first time I really outlined my views of justice and my role in making the world a better place. I devoured the summer reading in 4 days and left my usual construction work to do political canvassing and then directing a voter registration office. Throughout the summer I became more and more interested in how the Internet could be used to engage Americans in the day-to-day decisions of government.”

White-Sullivan also points to an ethnobotany (study of plants and culture) course he took with Chris Kilham. “I was fascinated by how he was using business and trade to improve the lives of indigenous people and protect the environment of the Amazon. After I told him of my interest, we met a few times for coffee and he gave me advice on books to read and people to meet. In one of those meetings, he mentioned that a green marketing class was going to a natural products trade show that week. So, I called the organizers of the trip, learned there was an extra ticket, and two days later found my way to Baltimore.”

At the trade show, White-Sullivan met the founders of Sol Mate, a company that makes a soft drink from the South American Yerba Mate plant. Amherst, they soon realized, would be a perfect venue for this product. On his return, White-Sullivan got permission to use a loading dock, and Sol Mate then sent more than 2,000 bottles that he carried (with friends) to his dorm room. Over the course of the year, White-Sullivan distributed the drinks to three student-run businesses, besides selling and sampling them out at campus events. White Sullivan notes, “When I started this work, I had no business experience or education. A year later, when I began building Localocracy.org, I had that experience to build on, but I also became involved with the Entrepreneurship Initiative here on camupus. EI gave me the skills, network, and opportunities that have allowed me to take this initiative this far.”

Meanwhile, White-Sullivan, who had been considering a BDIC in ethnobiology, realized that all of the courses he was really interested in lay in the Anthropology Department, and that he could dramatically expand the scope of his studies by pursuing his major there. “My major,” he says, “remains relevant to my life and career goals even as my interests have shifted from herbal medicines to high technology. Understanding how rapidly society has changed has helped me realize that the future has no limits.”

July 10, 2009